Industry-Specific Firm Growth and Agglomeration

Duschl M., Scholl T., Brenner T., Luxen D. and Raschke F. Industry-specific firm growth and agglomeration, Regional Studies. This paper analyses the industry-specific relationship between industrial clustering and firm growth. Micro-geographically defined agglomeration measures based on travel-time distances and a flexible log-logistic decay function framework are used to study the spatial impacts of related economic and knowledge-generating activities in 23 industries. It is found that firms' growth prospects tend to be generally hampered by the agglomeration of own-industry employment, whereas the impact of proximate scientific activities systematically depends on the kind and age of industry. Furthermore, the optimal specifications of decay function that measures agglomeration effects considerably vary between both the industrsssies and the variables.